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Choosing A 2013 Laptop/Ultrabook For Linux

11-30-2013, 07:10 AM

Phoronix: Choosing A 2013 Laptop/Ultrabook For Linux

Yesterday I ended up buying a new Intel ultrabook for Linux testing at Phoronix. Here's the hardware that will soon be featured in some new Linux benchmarks, plus my reasoning for going with this ultrabook and other thoughts on some of the laptops/ultrabooks this holiday season...

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I wonder when we going to see many Iris Pro 5200 laptops.
The only one is the Clevo that looks so cheap.
I just purchased a Razer Blade 14". I really enjoy this laptop, but if theres a laptop with Core i7 with Iris Pro 5200 in a Razer Blade 14" package (even without nvidia) I definitely buy one.

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I have a Clevo W110ER laptop (11.6" laptop). All laptops made by Clevo are barebones for which they offer various components. I've picked CPU, RAM, WiFi (Intel Centrino to make it Linux friendly), HDD... It works great. At lowest brightness it can even last ~6h when doing low intensity browsing (while it uses Core i7)... but there is one big problem - Intel released Haswell and now Clevo + other companies make only Haswell compatible barebones/laptops. At some point there won't be any good barebone left in any of the shops and good CPU like Ivy Bridge i7 will be useless (while still powerful with no need for a Haswell replacement for $$$$). Barebone supposed to make laptop upgrades cheaper... and if you buy a Haswell based barebone now there is no guarantee that next generation of CPUs won't be incompatible and will force everyone to change the CPU as well. Waste of money, waste of electronics, non-eco-friendly way of making money for Intel

On the other hand China makes a lot of ARM based Android devices. For one Core i7 retail price you could buy like 5 Android HDMI dongles (1 GB RAM, quad core Rockchip, Android 4.2.2, some USBs, HDMI etc.). 2-3 if you want more RAM or an Octa-core Exynos single board computer. In this case exchanging whole "computer" for a newer model is very cheap. It would be nice to have a laptop that runs desktop Linux on ARM where hardware upgrade/replacement is at such "low" prices. But still I would need things like Virtualbox, PyCharm IDE and 8-16 GB RAM on that ARM computer to replace my x86 box. More features on ARM platform would increase price, but still competition is good for customers.

Or they could make motherboards replacable making barebone shells long lasting product.

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I got a Lenovo ThinkPad T530 a couple of months ago and aside from Optimus and the GPS unit this has been a great out-of-the-box experience with Debian Jessie. I have yet to make the GPS work but other than that everything is fine.

Turns out Optimus is working pretty well these days; all I needed from experimental was the nvidia-driver package. The bumblebee package from Jessie finds the NVS5400M GPU right away after that. It does produce quite the lot of heat and munches through my battery about 2-3 times faster with the NVIDIA GPU activated though.

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Isn't the 2013 Haswell Macbook Air working with little to no problems with a recent distro (Ubuntu 13.10, Mint 16, Fedora 20)? It seems like the last time you tested it was with an old software stack and/or pre-release components on Ubuntu 13.04, Michael.